Survey to cover train and bus needs
By: David Weinstein
The Township Council is looking to address questions about South Brunswick’s transportation needs with a townshipwide questionnaire.
A survey concerned with trains and buses and routes for both soon will arrive in mailboxes throughout South Brunswick, the Township Council decided Tuesday night.
“The survey is good to go, just needed a little discussion Tuesday night,” Mayor Debra Johnson said Wednesday. She said residents can expect the survey in their mailboxes soon.
The survey, designed to reveal a consensus among township residents on transit issues facing South Brunswick, will focus on a possible second Park & Ride facility within the township, as well as bus routes people now take and those they’d like to see implemented into a bus route.
No specific sites were mentioned for a Park & Ride facility, which would allow commuters and travelers to park their vehicles at a facility lot and catch a bus to their destination. There is a Park & Ride facility on Route 130 at Route 32.
Questions regarding rail service, including the proposed Monmouth-Ocean-Middlesex line, also are to be included in the survey.
The line has been considered by NJ Transit and is opposed by the Middlesex County Freeholders, South Brunswick, Jamesburg and Monroe, the $30 million MOM Line would use existing freight rails that run east and west, and link with the Northeast Corridor in Lakewood. The line is not an active issue at the present time, DOT officials have said recently.
Council members concerned themselves Tuesday night with the format of the survey. The council also discussed the cost of a township-wide mailing.
While the cost to survey the entire township via the Postal Service may reach $3,000, the importance of the consensus overrides the cost, Councilman Ted Van Hessen said Tuesday.
Such a mass mailing is needed, he said, because a small sample of township residents’ opinions may suffer from a skewed demographic, could elicit multiple responses from individuals or even play to special interest groups in town.
“We need as large a response as possible,” Mr. Van Hessen said. “We should use our Web site to promote it, and spend what it costs to do it correctly.”
All four council members attending the meeting directed Township Manager Matthew Watkins to proceed with the survey, which is being co-sponsored by the Greater Mercer Transportation Management Association.
Councilman Ed Luciano, whom the mayor said was away on business, did not attend the meeting.
Mr. Van Hessen said the form shouldn’t take too much time to fill out and should target important mass-transit questions in town as directly as possible — without mirroring the long form of the census, he joked.
Mayor Johnson agreed.
“People don’t like to spend too much time on surveys,” Mayor Johnson said.
But she also said the importance of addressing long-term mass-transit questions is of vital interest to the council, and the township.
“Do you support these possibilities? Would you use them? What about the NE corridor line train? These are the questions we need to answer, and only the township (residents) can answer them together,” she said.
At the beginning of the discussion, the survey seemed set to focus on just the possibility of a Park & Ride, but council members saw this survey as a good opportunity to gauge opinion on other transit questions.
“It’s important to get the pulse of the community on issues like these,” Councilwoman Carol Barrett said. “There’s probably a lot of interest in all these issues. We need to know where that interest is.”